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  • Through a Classical Eye: Transcultural and Transhistorical Visions in Medieval English, Italian, and Latin Literature in Honour of Winthrop Wetherbee
  • John O. Ward
Andrew Galloway and R. F. Yeager, eds. Through a Classical Eye: Transcultural and Transhistorical Visions in Medieval English, Italian, and Latin Literature in Honour of Winthrop Wetherbee. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009. Pp. viii, 436. $80.00.

The editors of Through a Classical Eye point out in their introduction Winthrop Wetherbee's significance as a latter-day successor to the "giants of early twentieth-century medieval (and other) 'philology' and literary study, especially Erich Auerbach, Ernst Robert Curtius, C. S. Lewis and Leo Spitzer" (4). And certainly this festschrift will remind everyone of Wetherbee's decisive contributions to the study of the twelfth-century Latin classics and "the adapters and creative mis-readers of the classical Latin tradition, Jean de Meun, Dante, Chaucer and Gower" (5). A bibliography ofWetherbee's publications (19-24), a concluding essay (415-18) by a close friend, Robert Morgan, and a list of prestigious contributors complete the presentation of Wetherbee's character and achievements. Needless to say, the contributors usually document their debt to Wetherbee and note where their contribution fits into the pattern of his own interests.

The essays assembled fall into three groups: "auctores" (four essays), "Italy and the world" (six essays) and "England and Beyond" (nine essays). In "auctores," Joseph Pucci gives us a taste of his forthcoming book, Augustine's Ancient Affections, in arguing that Catullus's mesmerizing [End Page 408] use of words sat deeper in the souls of late antique writers than we have hitherto believed. I find the uses of Catullus by Fortunatus writing to Agnes, Abbess of the Convent of the Holy Cross, slightly more compelling than those signalized in Augustine's Confessions 1.5.5, but this is still a striking article. Danuta Shanzer contributes a learned set of glosses on problematic points in the notorious "Irish" text of the seventh century, the Hisperica Famina. Jeremy Tambling unites Bernard Silvester, Augustine, Derrida, and Dante in quest of creation, matter, good, evil, and the allegory of selva oscura, the heartland of much of Wetherbee's work. R. F. Yeager concludes this portion of the volume with a probing of the unusually frequent metaphor of shipwreck in Alan of Lille's De planctu naturae, showing how the term "contributes to Alain's poetic endeavor to create 'a mode of allegory both cosmological and sacramental' " (101).

In "Italy and the World," the key part of the feast is the first essay, in which Rita Copeland provides an arresting comment on the way impersonal didactic "technai" in the Middle Ages replaced the personal charisma of teachers. She achieves great effect by way of a study of the unique link between "technai" and charisma in Guido Faba's Rota Nova. This is an essay everyone should read and it displays excellently the author's ability to think quite outside the normal routines of study and to illuminate all our detailed work. In the first of two essays dealing with Dante, Giuseppe Mazzotta provides a wide-ranging set of ideas on "the incommensurability between divine wisdom and human knowledge" (136), justice, and "geometry and its relations to art, ethics, history and geography" (141) in connection with Paradiso VIII-XX. He concludes that "the Divine Comedy [is] a text radically unlike the epic poems of Homer and Virgil," as Dante "brings thought to its outermost boundaries and asks of us that we edge to the limits of ourselves [herein producing] a poetic text wherein borders are not construed as barriers" (142). Warren Ginsberg follows this up with a complex set of links in Dante between geography, rhetoric, and dialectic (talking of Inferno XVI) and between Dante, Boccaccio, and Chaucer. Teresa A. Kennedy then "seeks to explore the contradictions in Boccaccio's understanding of Greek classicism as a humanist philological project on the one hand, and its genealogical and rhetorical relationship to vernacular themes and motifs including Byzantium and the Islamic world on the other" (165). She concludes that "Boccaccio's Greek philology, the echoes of Troy and Thebes, of Griselda and Criseida, all destabilize the categories of...

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